


You Don’t Pass Up Your 50-Year Storm

by syllic



Category: Lovesick | Scrotal Recall (TV)
Genre: BFFs, Bucket List, F/M, Fluff, Found Family, POV Outsider
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-26
Updated: 2015-12-26
Packaged: 2018-05-09 11:46:05
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,614
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5538656
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/syllic/pseuds/syllic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><b>1. Build a moon base on the moon</b><br/><br/>Luke’s 29 now.  He may not have built a moon base on the moon just yet, but he’s working on it, in his way.  It was the first thing to go on the list when he was seven, and if someone asked, Luke would tell them he’s still chasing the dream.</p><p>If it turns out that little Luke’s dreams were a little too much for this world—if the moon base stays on the list forever, never to be crossed out—well, that’s all right too.  It’s not a fucking bucket list if you’ve done it all, is it?<br/><br/></p>
            </blockquote>





	You Don’t Pass Up Your 50-Year Storm

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thecarlysutra](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thecarlysutra/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide, Carly! You said _Scrotal Recall_ was your fave media find of 2015; I fell in love with it when I first watched it and was thrilled to see it on the Yuletide fandoms list. I am even more thrilled to get a chance to write something in it for you, and I hope I can do this lovely show even a little bit of justice.
> 
> (For people who have never watched it: _Scrotal Recall_ is about three friends, Luke, Evie, and Dylan, dating and generally trying to adult (not well). Luke is kind of a tool, but the kind of tool that it’s really hard not to love; Evie and Dylan are painfully in love but neither will say anything to the other about it. Luke has a bucket list that includes the item ‘Meet [tennis player] Sue Barker’; he also has serious regrets about a girl named Phoebe, whom he should have pursued. He had a traumatic social incident in secondary school when he briefly had the same haircut as his mum.
> 
> That’s pretty much all you need to know for the purposes of this fic. The show is charming, and on Netflix, and so worth a watch.)
> 
> I feel I should warn for the fact that this story discusses punching a dog. This references something mentioned in the show; in the story, Luke pretends to punch a dog to distract someone from something else. No dogs are hurt.
> 
> Thanks to V for looking this over. Anything still wrong with it is my fault.
> 
> <3333, Carly!  
>   
> 

  
  
**8\. Meet Sue Barker**  
  
Luke’s thinking about Sue when he goes for it.

You’d think it’d be Phoebe: they’ve just come back from her mum’s and Luke’s chest feels split apart and raw with it, and for the first time in his life he thinks _don’t waste it_ in a way that feels urgent and powerful, in a way that doesn’t mean _today’s hesitation can’t be tonight’s shag, Dylan, so get it together, mate_.

But it’s Sue that he’s thinking about: her titles and that one time a dog bit her in the fucking _eye_ , and she thought she’d lost her career but managed to get back on the court. About her 1976 French Open win, her only Grand Slam title in a years-long career, probably all the more glorious for its rarity. About determination and loss and things just passing you the fuck by when there’s no reason for them to. 

As far as Luke’s concerned, if old Sue could get back on the horse after a harrowing eye-biting incident, Dylan and Evie can bloody well talk to each other, for fuck’s sake.

“He’s in love with you,” he says to Evie, almost vicious, but he doesn’t _feel_ vicious: he feels alive, shaking with it, and completely unable to let those two fucking idiots spend one more day in the limbo they’ve created for themselves.

He leaves them sitting at the pub, stunned and wide-eyed, both tearing up because Evie is a warrior everywhere except her heart, and Dylan cries at nappy adverts.

He’s halfway down the street when he realises he’s genuinely about to bloody cheat _himself_ out of some quality entertainment, and he doubles back. He orders a pint and ensconces himself in an out-of-the-way corner, watching them and trying to make sure he’s not inconveniently reflected in a mirror somewhere over the bar.

He learned that lesson the hard way.

It doesn’t look as if they’re having a good time of it. There aren’t any passionate kisses that look like they should be accompanied by swelling violins. There are more tears—mostly from Dylan: of fucking course, Dylan, of fucking course—and clearly more than a few awkward silences. Evie looks furious and, a few minutes in, Dylan starts looking cross, too; the two of them have probably realised they’ve been effectively sabotaging _themselves_ for a good five years now, like a bad storyline on Byker Grove.

(And no, Evie, not all Byker Grover storylines were bad; that was a classic show, fuck you very much.)

Luke drinks his pint slowly, watching Dylan’s shoulders draw up further and further around his ears and Evie’s mouth pinch tighter and tighter in response.

They don’t kiss; they don’t hold hands; they don’t even smile.

But when they stand up, Luke can see it: the only reason Evie is going home to Mal right now is to tell him it’s over.

Luke feels for her. I mean, he’s had some awkward break-ups, but even he’d be hard pressed to find a way to make this one anything other than dreadful. 

Dumping your fiancé for the man everyone, probably including your fiancé, knows you’ve been in love with for years: likely not a winner.

On the other hand, Luke thinks, watching the easy way Dylan is loping out of the pub, catching the barely visible relief around Evie’s eyes—on the other hand, _fucking yes, already_.  
  
  
  
**27\. Ilona McLeod**  
  
Luke meets Dylan when they’re both freshers at uni.

Actually, he supposes, strictly speaking he meets Evie first. He can’t say he remembers that encounter _entirely_ , but he’s sure he was extremely charming. He’s always charming after a lot of Smirnoff Ice.

Whatever. Point is, Luke meets Dylan during Freshers’ Week. Luke’s propping himself up against the side of the kebab van outside the Student Union, eating cheesy chips and trying to imagine interesting backstories for all the women that walk by. If anyone asks, he’ll tell them he’s marking them for attractiveness on a scale of one to ten, but the reality is that he’s trying to imagine if any of them are as glad as he is to be as far away as possible from wherever they went to secondary school.

He meets Dylan when Dylan stumbles out of the Union on the heels of a fantastically fit girl in a denim skirt and boots. He’s clearly besotted, pathetic in his transparency, and she’s wavering between being flattered and being completely fed up. Luke’s able to tell, but as he watches it becomes clear that Dylan can’t see it at _all_. There he is, in all his Labrador-ish enthusiasm, as blind to her annoyance as if someone’d slipped cloth over his eyes.

“Tom, mate!” Luke calls loudly, clapping Dylan heavily on the shoulder.

(He’ll later tell Dylan that he did it because Dylan looked like a Tom, but the reality is that Luke’s piss-ups can go 50-50 between utter brilliance and incredibly stunted creativity. Tom had literally been the only name he’d been able to think of.)

“Wha—” Dylan begins to ask, but Luke’s dragging him away before he’s managed to get the full question out.

“Trust me,” he says later, in the too-earnest way of too many pints. 

Dylan’s staring at him intently, eyes blurry with alcohol and mouth slightly open with confusion. 

Luke gets this reaction a lot.

“Trust me,” he repeats, waving his pint about. “There are… there are good girls out there, girls who are good for a one-night stand and girls who are good for an eventual cottage in the Highlands with a few dogs. Then there are girls who are probably not good for either, mate. I’m telling you. There are girls out there who might be the fittest thing you ever saw—” Luke takes a good long swallow of his lager— “But they’ll just as soon stab you in the back as kiss you. They’ll just as soon laugh about Mumcut, even if they’ll pretend later they never did.”

Dylan continues to look incredibly confused, but he isn’t standing up and walking out of the pub, so he’s probably willing to keep listening. 

With time Luke will understand that this is Dylan in a nutshell: kindness and loyalty and rapt attention (except when it matters, except when paying attention would help him avoid a shit situation or find his way to happiness).

That’s Dylan: Dylan is a good person, in the same way that Evie is sharp and funny and warm, also a brilliant fucking human being. 

They’re the kind of people worth keeping, and Luke knows that the moment he sets eyes on them. He knows it in the same way he knows that the people whose attention he’d wanted in secondary school weren’t worth his time or his effort or his affection.

He pretends to forget the second, after uni. He works to become the kind of person those people won’t ever be able to ridicule again, and he thinks constantly about the day he’ll get to go back and prove that to them.

He pretends to forget the second, after uni, but the first is impossible to forget, because Evie and Dylan won’t allow it: Evie and Dylan, who see Luke for who he is and love him for it, who go out of their ways to remind Luke of that, because that’s the kind of people they are.  
  
  
  
**35\. Master origami**  
  
When Luke was six years old, his grandpa Jon died.

Luke didn’t really know his grandfather well at all; throughout his childhood, Luke’s impression of the man was mostly that he was tall. He had a soft voice that would nonetheless carry through the walls when he held court in his sitting room. He was reserved, stilted and almost rough with what little affection he showed his grandchildren, but Luke still remembers sitting on his lap on the old flowered settee that his grandparents kept by the window.

The day he died, Luke watched his mother cry, not really understanding what was happening. They went back to his nana’s for the wake, and Luke walked through the seas of dark-clad adults, breathing in his grandfather’s sandalwood smell, which would continue to permeate corners of the house for years.

When Luke, Evie, and Dylan are almost done with uni, Luke’s nana has a fall. Luke’s mum calls from hospital to let Luke know; Luke offers to come up, but his mum tells him not to worry.

Nana has surgery to put pins in her arm, and Luke’s looking forward to seeing her at the Easter break, to making jokes about Terminator that she won’t understand, so she can tell him to stop it, boy, and slap at him with gentle hands.

But when Luke bounds into her house a month later, he finds a frail, quiet woman, so unlike the nana he remembers that he feels betrayed, unable to shower her with all the inappropriate comments he’s been saving up for months.

It isn’t clear to Luke what is happening—it isn’t clear until his whole family is huddled around nana’s hospital bed later that break.

Luke sits in the armchair they’d pushed out into the corridor (so all of Luke’s terrible cousins could crowd into the room with nana) and folds cranes, something he’s only recently learned how to do thanks to a late-night Wikipedia tunnel.

On the way to hospital Luke stopped at a stationery shop to buy a sheaf of pastel-coloured A4, and once he arrived he applied himself to folding crane after crane after crane while sitting in the armchair, like a little girl he’d read about in a book in primary school, once.

There’s a sudden flutter of panicked whispering in the room behind him, and Luke closes his eyes against it, burying his face in his scarf. It smells like Luke’s cologne, sandalwood and citrus, which he picked for its familiarity.

“Luke, darling,” his mother says. “She’s asking for you.”

Luke thinks about refusing, about keeping his eyes down on the paper in front of him. In the end he doesn’t, of course. 

He puts the last fold in his crane and cradles it in his hand, making his way into the room.

“Nana,” he says, to the pale, wan figure in the hospital bed. “You don’t look as if you’re long for the world.”

“Stop it, boy,” she says, smiling. “Or I’ll have you over my knee, don’t think I won’t.”

“Nana,” he replies, feeling as if something is lodged in his throat, “The doctor said no BDSM until you were fully recovered.”

A second after the words are out of his mouth it strikes Luke that he’s just inadvertently made a sex joke about his grandmother—a sex joke that _involves him_. She takes one look at his no doubt horrified face before bursting into cackles, great unapologetic peals of raspy laughter that completely drown out the sound of the medical machines.

Luke, still torn between horror and more horror, feels a smile pulling at his lips as he approaches the bed, taking her little hand in his.

“Hoisted,” she gasps around her laughter. “Hoisted on your own petard.”

Luke grins despite himself, watching as she laughs herself to tiredness. Her eyes drift shut, but the smile stays on her face after she falls asleep. 

Luke puts his paper crane on the little shelf above the bed, and leaves her to rest.

He takes out his phone to check it before he settles back in with his sheaf of paper in the corridor. He has a text message from Evie.

 _What room is your grandmother in?_ it reads.

 _204_ , Luke replies, thinking she might send flowers—that’s the sort of thing Evie does, even if it means she can’t afford council tax later. _Don’t worry about sending flowers_ , he types, and just then he hears two familiar voices around the corner.

“Stop being such a cock about it,” Evie whispers, probably in deference to the setting.

“I’m not being a cock about it,” Dylan replies, obviously too loud for a hospital, probably not even registering that Evie’s trying to keep her voice down. “I’m just saying, what if his family think it’s strange that we’ve just shown up?”

“Then they’ll think it’s strange,” Evie replies, no-nonsense. “We didn’t come for them.”

“Well, that’s true,” Dylan answers.

Luke puts his head down to look at his phone, mostly so they won’t be embarrassed to see him waiting when they come ’round the corner.

For the first time that break, he feels something approaching happy.  
  
  
  
**23\. Climb near Everest**  
  
Luke’s watched Dylan have sex twice.

That sounds, honestly, a lot worse than it is. It’s not as if Luke has been seeking out a glimpse of Dylan’s bits, let alone the sight of Dylan’s insultingly pale arse, but sometimes things happen, and that’s all Luke’s going to say about that.

The first time it happens is the worst—it will _always be the worst_ —because Dylan doesn’t even have the decency to be fucking some hateful woman from Luke’s past. Here they all are, at a party in the middle of nowhere with bankers throwing themselves at Dylan left and fucking right, _left and fucking right, Dylan_ , and Dylan goes and decides that the one time Luke’s going to walk in on him having sex, the wanker’s going to be having sex with _Evie_.

It’s like some awful two-for-one horror special, and Luke tries to back out of the barn as quickly as he fucking can, but then he feels his shoulder brush something and oh shit, there comes a collection of farming implements, and Luke is too busy trying to catch most of them in his hands and one of them—oh _thank fuck_ —with his outstretched foot before they all clatter to the ground and give Luke away.

Luke is very carefully stacking the rakes and shovels and whatever else he’s got in his hands against the wall, gingerly leaning them, one by one, against the wood, and the whole time— _the whole time_ —the worst sex show in the entire fucking world is happening where Luke can’t help but see it out of the corner of his eye.

They’re clearly not expecting anyone to be there, which is amateur mistake number one. Sex in public places: all well and good, but if you don’t keep an eye and an ear out, that’s on you.

It’s… it’s clearly not the first time they’ve done it. Luke knows for a fact (and he means _for a fact_ , neither of those two could lie convincingly if their lives depended on it) that they’ve never had sex before today, which means this is the second time they’re going tonight, and for a moment he feels a rush of relief, because you can explain a drunken tumble in a barn, but twice?

Twice says something.

Twice means they have to talk about it.

And it’s about fucking time.

Anyway. Back to the horrifying sex show. Luke knows it’s not the first time for the following reason: those two are so fucked up over each other that there is no way the first time wasn’t missionary, Evie cradled between Dylan’s arms and an absolutely ridiculous, unforgivable amount of meaningful eye contact.

Luke knows, okay?

But now Dylan is sprawled on the threadbare old sofa—why is there a sofa in this barn, why are there fairy lights, who keeps a romantic shag set-up in a barn? These are all things Luke wants to know—one foot braced against the ground and his hands on Evie’s hips.

Evie is on top, tiny and fierce like she always is. Her absolutely fantastic tits (sorry; but there’s the fact that your best friends who are in love with each other are off-limits and then there’s the fact that Evie’s tits are _fucking fantastic_ ) are bouncing with the movement of her body against Luke’s, and her hair is tumbling down her back, and she’s beautiful.

She’s beautiful in the way paintings are beautiful: Luke is not only not turned on, but he might, he thinks, actually be anti-turned on by the whole thing. But Dylan is panting shamelessly beneath her and her eyes are closed and her head is thrown back and Luke is… Luke is happy for them. It’s a very, very, very strange moment of sex-inclusive affection between the three of them, and Luke vows right then and there never to think about it again.

As Luke watches Dylan seems to shake himself free of the no doubt hugely embarrassing romantic monologue in his head, and he takes Evie’s hips more firmly and pulls himself awkwardly onto one elbow. He re-situates himself on the sofa, shifting Evie, too, and suddenly Luke can see the wet slide of her up and down Dylan’s cock. He can hear the way the air is rushing out of her every time Dylan slams home, he can feel how warm the drafty old barn is with the two of them.

 _Fuck_ , Luke thinks, because that’s not anti-turned on anymore. He bustles out like a man on important business, because all he wanted, _all he bloody wanted_ was to tell his friends how awful a person Ilona actually turned out to be—how awful a person Ilona had always been, let’s be honest—and instead he got an eyeful, didn’t he, and now he’s going to have to go drink the sight away with Ivan.

 _With Ivan_.  
  
  
  
The second time it happens, it goes like this:

Luke is hurrying home to tell Dylan something—later he won’t remember what it was, because Dylan apparently has a spectacular capacity to put Luke in sex-adjacent situations that Luke would rather forget entirely, and sometimes the related details also disappear—and he’s so caught up in whatever he was going to say that he swings the door to Dylan’s room open without knocking.

He never imagines Dylan’s going to be in there with someone, because: look, Luke had thought that the more-than-once-in-a-single-night sex would have been enough for those two idiots to get their heads out of their arses, but Dylan and Evie have yet to figure out any fucking thing at all, and so Dylan is currently doing his best impression of a sadsack American television character who eats too much ice cream and browses Facebook while crying.

Luke’s expecting the mild trauma of Dylan in his pants weeping over old pictures of Evie, but instead he gets the horrifying trauma of Dylan fucking a—beautiful—woman from behind.

He’s putting everything he’s got into it, and they’re both loving it: her ludicrously good hair is fluttering about her face, and Dylan has his mouth open as he gives it to her hard.

 _It’s the hot hotel receptionist_ , Luke realises. _Dylan, that fucking dog._ It’s always the quiet ones, etc., etc.

The whole thing takes only a second. Luke backs out of the bedroom as quickly as his legs will take him and shuts the door quietly behind him, hoping they didn’t see him. Her head was down and Dylan seemed awfully distracted, so Luke probably got away with it.

It looked like pretty good sex.

(Luke knows pretty good sex, if he says so himself.)

He also knows Dylan, though, and it looked like more than just sex—he likes this girl, Luke knows. He’s liked her from the start.

And yet as good a time as it looked like they were having, as good as she could be for Dylan, as good as they could be for each other… Luke also knows what climbing near Everest looks like.

Climbing near Everest makes for a great story. Climbing near Everest could well change your life.

Climbing near Everest is an excellent fucking life goal, but it’s no guarantee you won’t find yourself looking at pictures of actual Everest on Google sometime down the line, happy and satisfied but unable to let that last kernel of regret in your chest go.

And, as much as Luke would like for it not to be true for those two emotionally incapable idiots (and when _Luke_ thinks you’re emotionally incapable…), Dylan and Evie are each other’s Everest.

Well, something like that, anyway.

Luke’s not a fucking psychologist, after all.

But the thinks the general sentiment is sound.  
  
  
  
**40\. Cook a meal**  
  
“Welcome!” Dylan says, too enthusiastic by half and with a grin on his face better suited to a documentary about a ‘perfectly normal neighbour’ who one day murdered five people before going back to his flat to finish up making tea.

“Hello,” says Luke, as judgmentally as he can.

Evie appears from behind Dylan, flapping an oven glove-covered hand at Luke and rolling her eyes at her boyfriend. She doesn’t fool Luke, though: she’s nervous too.

Luke can be gracious for the sake of the greater good. People might not think that about him, but he only punched that dog once (he didn’t _actually punch the dog_ , all right? He made a dog-punching _motion_ ) when he was twelve because his dad had just come home after three days away ‘on business’, and his mum’s friend Lizzie had been looking at Luke’s mum with a sad, pitying look in her yes.

No one was going to be looking at Luke’s mum like that, not if Luke could help it, and it turned out the whole theatre with Buster ( _pretending to punch Buster_ , as Luke had emphatically told the RSPCA people who came by their house later, after Lizzie reported them, what a _cow_ ) got everyone’s attention off Luke’s mum and onto Luke, which was exactly what Luke had wanted.

Anyway, point is: Luke had (pretend) punched that dog because he can be gracious for the sake of the greater good, and he’ll do it for his friends now, if they need it.

He follows a stumbling Dylan up the stairs and down the corridor of his and Evie’s tiny flat. The kitchen is crowded but well kept, and they’ve set up a nice IKEA table with three mismatched chairs against the window.

“Smells all right,” Luke says, glancing at the lasagne in the oven.

“Thanks,” says Evie, leaving the oven glove on the stove and turning toward the sink to wash some tomatoes.

“Sit down, sit down,” says Dylan.

Luke watches incredulously as Dylan pulls out a chair. He approaches the chair more out of second-hand embarrassment for Dylan than out of any real desire to sit down, unscrewing the cap on the bottle of wine he’s brought with him as he goes. Once he’s sitting down he holds the bottle out to Dylan and says,

“Why don’t you take this into the sitting room for a few minutes, mate. Come back when you’re ready, yeah?”

Dylan looks as if he’s about to argue, but then he silently takes the bottle from Luke’s outstretched hand and shuffles out the door.

“How have you not killed him yet?” Luke asks.

Evie looks down at the tomatoes. She looks slightly flushed, and Luke can just imagine she’s thinking some unforgivably soppy thing, probably about Dylan’s kind eyes or his decently-sized-if-not-huge cock.

Luke shakes his head, wishing he hadn’t given the wine to Dylan. Luke’s need is just as great.

“You two seem happy,” he says when Evie doesn’t answer, because, once again, he can be gracious when he needs to be.

“We are,” says Evie. “Despite our admittedly impressive history of cocking this up. We are.”

She smiles, seemingly helpless, and though Luke is unlikely to admit it later, he smiles too.

“All right, all right,” he says. “Enough about you.”

His plan is to turn the conversation to the new woman at his gym, whom Luke has been very carefully seducing over the last two weeks, but then, despite his best efforts, he can’t help but say, “I’m happy for you two.”

Evie looks at him, surprised, and says, “Thank you, Luke,” and Luke can tell she’s thanking him for more than just wishing her and Dylan well.

“Not a problem,” he says, waving her gratitude away. He doesn’t do this kind of thing well. “I’m always right, Evie. Our lives would be so much easier if you and Dyls would just remember that.”

“Right,” she snorts. “I definitely plan to regularly take advice from a man who’s never cooked a meal in his life, and who owns a car he can’t even drive. That’s always been my life ambition.”

“Wait, who says I’ve never cooked a meal in my life?” Luke says, utterly outraged.

She looks surprised. “Uh… I thought you crossed out the things that you’d done?”

Luke looks back at her, confused.

“From your list?” she says. “You know, you’d crossed out number five, ‘Ride on the handlebars of a bike’, and then you’d added 5b, ‘Get a cast and draw a penis on it even if you get in trouble at school’, but you’d not crossed out ‘Cook a meal’? Or fifty-two, ‘Sex with twins in Las Vegas’?”

Luke laughs. 

“Oh, young Evie,” he says. “It’s not that simple, of course. If it’s been done once and that was enough, it gets crossed out, yes. If I realise I no longer want to do something that I once did, it gets crossed out twice, which is a good reminder of internal victories over past desires. If I did it but it was enjoyable, I don’t cross it out; why limit yourself to once if it’s a good thing?” He pauses. “But you know, now that you mention it, I probably ought to cross out ‘cook a meal’ after all, because while I didn’t hate it, why cook if someone else will feed you?”

She rolls her eyes at him, and Luke grins.

She finishes cutting the tomatoes. As she’s transferring them onto the salad plate she cocks her head, and says, “You know, there was this one thing on the list, sort of half-crossed out, and we did it because we assumed you’d actually meant to cross out the thing below it and realised what you were doing before you finished, but—”

Luke wags his eyebrows at her. He knows exactly which thing she means, and she realises he does: she puts the oven gloves back on, flustered, and busies herself taking the lasagne out of the oven to cool.

“ _Really_?” she says a minute later.

“Really,” says Luke, lifting one shoulder in a shrug.

“But you’re just so… with _whom_?”

“Hey, guys,” says Dylan, appearing in the doorway. “Sorry, I can probably be a bit less of a wanker now I’ve had half this bottle of wine.”

Luke watches as Evie works through what she just asked, as she looks at Dylan and gets it, and he grins at her when she throws her head back and laughs.  
  
  
  
**41\. Kiss a man**  
  
Plenty of American teen films have told Luke that university is a time for experimenting, and because Luke is not about to discard the wisdom of masterpieces such as _Road Trip_ , he decides to do something about it right before exams.

“I need to kiss a man,” he tells Dylan, very seriously, throwing himself down into Dylan’s bed and sighing loudly.

“All… right?” Dylan says, seemingly shocked out of being outraged about being interrupted _yet again, Luke, I’ll kill you_ , while he’s revising for finals, which was exactly Luke’s plan.

“Listen, Dyls,” Luke says, holding up a hand before Dylan can remember he’s supposed to be colour-coding files, or whatever the fuck he does in here all afternoon. “We are a few weeks— _a few weeks!_ —away from getting out of here, and everybody knows that if I do it now, that’s completely fine, but if I wait until I have an accounting job in the city then it’s a crisis. Everybody knows.”

“You can’t even split the bill between three people at a restaurant,” says Dylan, slowly. “How are you going to be an accountant?”

“Dylan, you’re missing the point,” says Luke, propping himself up on his elbows and looking at him very seriously.

“…what’s the point again?” asks Dylan faintly.

“We’re going to gay bar,” Luke says. “That’s the point. Get up, change your shirt. Come on.”

“Luke,” says Dylan, frowning, and Luke knows what he’s going to say already. “I’ve told you, I _have_ to revise. I have to. This isn’t a lark anymore. It’s finals.”

“Dylan,” says Luke, urgently. “I am at a very particular turning point in my life right now. I am telling you that I need to kiss a man, and I need to do it before my exams next week, otherwise I could have a very serious situation on my hands later on in life, and none of us want that. Do you want that, Dylan? Does it seem as if exams are more important than _that_?”

“No,” says Dylan. “I don’t want that. But I also don’t want to go to a gay bar with you when I should be revising, particularly because this whole paper is one I never understood in the first place because we were drunk that entire term. Do you remember that? You told me we had to seize the moment, because if we did it before the second year of uni was over, it was a life experience, but if we did it later, it was alcoholism.”

“Well, it would have been,” says Luke. “You listened to me then, why aren’t you listening to me now?”

“I _am_ listening to you,” says Dylan. “You need to go to a gay bar or you’ll have an accountant crisis later in life. Fine. Why do _I_ need to go to a gay bar?”

“ _Because I need a wing man_ , Goose! Have you learned _nothing_ from the films I have painstakingly acted out for your benefit and edification?”

Dylan rolls his eyes. “Okay, okay, please don’t get it into your head that I need that film acted out again. Look. If I don’t agree to go to a gay bar with you tonight, will you stay here and whinge about it all night?”

“Yes,” says Luke. “Definitely.”

Dylan puts his hands in his hair, a very dramatic gesture he’s picked up from his awful girlfriend of the month, Sarah the Vegan.

“Luke, I don’t have time for this,” he says, and Luke is about to tell him that _everyone has time for a gay bar before the end of university_ , but then Dylan gets a strange look in his eye that Luke can’t read.

“I thought you loved pussy,” he says, finally.

“I _do_ love pussy, my friend. I love pussy, and I love tits, and I love the sweet little dips that women get right above their arse, but like I said, I don’t want to become a sad repressed banker because I never asked myself the right questions about whether there was more out there than girls with brilliant tits, do you know what I mean?”

“No!” says Dylan. “You can’t even do any maths, Luke, could you at least pick a realistic job in these scenarios?”

“Fine, fine,” Luke says. “When I’m doing absolutely nothing with my life later, I want to be able to say I’m not repressed and doing nothing with my life, will that do?”

Dylan sighs. “Look, what if…?”

“What if what?” 

Luke pounces, because Dylan always starts asking ‘what if’ questions when his resolve is weakening. What if we only do twenty shots instead of thirty, Luke? What if it’s not that she doesn’t like me, what if she really _did_ have to go look after her little brother even though she’d told me earlier that night that she was an only child?

“What if… what if I kissed you?” Dylan asks. “Would you fuck off and let me revise then?”

Luke thinks about it.

On the one hand: Dylan. Kissing his best friend in his tip of a room (which smells like curry after yesterday) while he’s dressed in some old tracksuit bottoms is not exactly the sophisticated experimentation experience Luke is after.

On the other hand: Dylan. No awkward explanations, no having to break some poor man’s heart after he falls in love with Luke at a gay bar, forcing Luke to explain he was only doing what American teen cinema told him to do (and what _Top Gun_ had _implied_ Luke should do).

“All right,” Luke says, sitting up. “All right, yes. That’ll do.”

“It will?” Dylan asks in a high-pitched voice, suddenly looking insultingly uncertain.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Dylan, get it together,” says Luke. “It’s just a kiss.”

“Right,” says Dylan. He wipes his hands on his tracksuit bottoms. “Right.”

Luke pats the bed next to him invitingly, and Dylan stands up from his desk chair and comes to sit gingerly on the mattress.

“So,” Dylan says, looking quickly at Luke before looking down again. “How should we do this?”

“How the fuck should I know?” Luke says. “You cheated me out of a kiss with an experienced gay kisser at a gay bar; _you_ fucking figure it out.”

Luke expects to have to goad Dylan into it, but he’s barely gotten the last word out when Dylan is darting toward him, terrifyingly quick—what, is he trying to _break Luke’s aquiline nose_ —only just stopping himself at the last minute from driving his face into Luke’s with the force of a small lorry.

It feels strange at first, Dylan’s lips pressed awkwardly and unsexily against Luke’s, but a second later Luke tilts his head and Dylan parts his lips and it turns into an actual kiss. Not a kiss from an experienced gay kisser at a gay bar, obviously, but something sort of lovely nonetheless.

Luke closes his eyes, breathing in slowly through his nose, and he puts his hand up to Dylan’s neck, under his ear.

Dylan lets him, and opens his mouth a little more so that Luke can get a bit of tongue action going. It’s warm, slick, a bit strange because it’s Dylan, but (Luke can’t deny it) _hot_.

It lasts maybe a minute more: it’s not going anywhere, but Luke is making sure he gets the full experience, and Dylan, it seems, agrees that now that they’re doing it they might as well make sure they do it well. A solid choice, Luke thinks—he’s fairly certain Dylan doesn’t want to be a banker in gay crisis either.

They pull apart with a quiet sound, and Luke looks assessingly at Dylan.

“That wasn’t bad,” he says.

“No,” Dylan says, laughing and blushing simultaneously, folding his hands against his lap.

Luke can tell that it wasn’t the same for Dylan as it was for him: Dylan liked it, but it didn’t feel the same way to him as it did to Luke—it didn’t feel hot and molten and right for a second.

Luke is quite pleased: this was exactly the kind of clarity he wanted.

“Well, thank you very much for that,” he says, standing up and tugging his t-shirt into place again. “You can go back to revising, now.”

“Okay,” says Dylan. 

He gives Luke a little wave, unperturbed, and Luke gives him a firm nod in reply. As he walks out of the room he sees Dylan turn back to his computer, still smiling, shaking his head a little and muttering, “Fucking Luke.”

Once Luke’s back in his room, he takes a pen out of his desk to cross item number 40 out. 

**Kiss a man** : done and done.

He’s halfway through crossing out _kiss_ when he stops.

He never crosses out the things that are enjoyable to do, after all, and he’s not about to start now.  
  
  
  
**1\. Build a moon base on the moon**  
  
When Luke had been seven years old, he’d been looking through one of his books on space when he’d come across a page on Helen Sharman.

 _Helen Sharman_ , it said: _First British person in space_.

There’d been a short interview with her below the title, and one of the questions had been, _How did you become an astronaut_?

 _I knew what I wanted to do since I was a child_ , had been Helen’s response, and there’d been a little drawing of a girl next to it to illustrate how young she’d been. _So when I was seven years old, I made a list of all the things I thought I’d have to do to get to space. When I got older, as I learned more things about space, I put more things on the list. Whenever I did one, like get my chemistry degree, I would cross it out on the list. I made a list for how to achieve my dreams, and I made sure I followed it_.

The next day, Luke had asked his mum to take him to the shops. They’d gone inside W.H. Smith’s and Luke had asked her to buy him a notebook. She’d looked bemused, but she’d bought it—she normally wasn’t so easy to convince, but then again, Luke was usually asking for an expensive video game, and not a notebook that cost 99p.

That night, Luke had started his list. He didn’t want to become an astronaut like Helen Sharman, but there were definitely some things he knew he wanted to do.

The list eventually migrated to a single piece of paper, because that was easier to keep. Over the years Luke added more things; Luke crossed things out, and edited things, and re-added things he’d already done when he realised it was important to.

Luke’s 29 now. He may not have built a moon base on the moon just yet, but he’s working on it, in his way. It was the first thing to go on the list when he was seven, and if someone asked, Luke would tell them he’s still chasing the dream.

If it turns out that little Luke’s dreams were a little too much for this world—if the moon base stays on the list forever, never to be crossed out—well, that’s all right too. It’s not a fucking bucket list if you’ve done it all, is it?  
  
  
  
**16\. Be amazing at drinking games**  
  
Luke is absolutely fucking trolleyed.

He’s allowed: he’s given his best man/maid of honour engagement party speech; he’s not embarrassing anyone.

There’s no Smirnoff Ice about, probably because this isn’t an unsupervised sixth-form party in someone’s back garden, but Luke’s fairly sure he’s being charming nonetheless.

The room is full of people who love Evie and Dylan. Luke can’t say he knows every single one, so, all right, maybe one of them secretly hates Evie and Dylan, but everyone who’s in the pub just seems so fucking _happy _.__

Luke shifts his weight as he stands by the bar, testing his balance, and plays a game with himself: try to name each person he sees, and, failing that, invent a perfectly good backstory to explain their presence there.

The first is easy. It’s Dylan’s beautiful ginger ex-girlfriend— _Anna? Anne? Neither of those?_

Luke wonders where she left her baby. She hurries toward Dylan and Evie; she hugs them both, each as enthusiastically as the other, and Luke thinks, again, _everyone is so fucking happy for them_.

There’s Angus, little eyes and huge grin, slightly downtrodden around the shoulders, maybe, but Luke can tell it’s not about Evie at all. The divorce, probably. When it’s his turn to congratulate Evie and Dylan his face is one large, terrifying smile. Good old Angus. Such a strange little man, but they love him anyway.

There’s that tall woman who sort of acts as Evie’s agent, sometimes. She’s from somewhere in Eastern Europe and Luke doesn’t have to think of a backstory for her, because he’s absolutely fucking sure she’s ex-KGB. Too terrifying to be anything else.

She looks slightly disdainfully at Dylan—to be fair to her, he is somewhat dim, poor boy—but her smile when she looks at Evie, while tiny, is sincere.

Everywhere Luke looks, there are delighted, enthusiastic people, and he makes up another game for himself: _Who’s the happiest person here (apart from the two people who just got engaged)_?

 _And apart from me_ , he thinks. _Who’s the happiest person here, apart from Dylan and Evie and me?_

He has to disqualify himself from the running, because there’s no competing with the feeling in his chest—expansive, brilliant, fierce. He probably won’t ever tell them how pleased he is for them, how much joy he wishes them. It’s not his style.

But, Luke thinks, as he catches Evie’s eye across the room, the fact is, he probably doesn’t have to say anything. Evie nudges Dylan and cocks her head over to where Luke is standing, and they both start walking toward him, huge grins on their faces.

They’re as pleased to see him as he is to see them, and they know.  
  
  
  
**9\. Jump out of a moving car like James Bond**  
  
Evie’s wedding dress is beautiful, a vintage, delicate lace net that sets off her skin and her smile and her—look, sorry, a fact’s a fact—fantastic tits.

There’s a white flower in her curls; Dylan has his cheek resting against her head as they dance. They both have their eyes closed.

Dylan’s awful band is playing an awful folk song from an awful band that no one’s ever fucking heard of. Potentially it’s an awful folk song written by Dylan’s awful band; Luke wouldn’t know. Dylan seems to like it, and Evie, at the very least, doesn’t seem to mind.

“My god, who are these awful people playing this awful folk song?” someone says from beside Luke.

Luke turns his head quickly, surprised. For the barest of moments he has a mad, irrational thought— _Phoebe?_ —and then he shakes his head and is back in the present.

There’s a woman standing next to him. She’s wearing a very short electric blue dress and holding a pint of lager, and as Luke watches, she takes two large swallows with obvious relish. She has green eyes and she’s cocking an eyebrow at Luke like she shares Luke’s wedding philosophy, and like she finds him as attractive as he finds her.

“Well, hello,” Luke says, turning slightly to show off his best angle. “I know. This is Dylan’s band. They _are_ fucking awful, which I’ve told him more than once. But I can’t bring myself to do it on his wedding day, somehow.”

“Fair enough,” she says. She drinks more of her lager. “As long as when he asks you whether you thought everyone had a good time, you tell him people said it was an all right do except for the fucking awful band.”

This is, actually, exactly what Luke had planned to do.

“That’s exactly what I was planning to do.”

“Rose,” says the woman, holding her glass up to Luke.

Luke taps his own pint against it. “Nice to meet you, Rose. Luke.”

The song is winding upward to an almost mind-bogglingly awful bridge. It sounds like there are banjos in it. Luke can’t see anyone playing a banjo, but he wouldn’t put it past Dylan’s awful band to have pre-recorded the banjos.

“You’d think they’d have drawn the line at pre-recording the banjos,” says Rose, laughing into her lager. “Do they have no shame, this awful band?”

Luke laughs too, but just at that moment Evie whispers something to Dylan, who smiles softly at her. 

Evie looks at him with a frankly disgusting amount of devotion, and Luke tries to hide his smile in his pint.

“And this. This amount of love is a little much, too,” says Rose, playfully mocking, but Luke can hear in her voice that it’s all getting to her a bit, as well. That she doesn’t mean the mocking at all.

He likes her more for it.

Luke nods in agreement. The two of them watch in silence as Evie and Dylan finish their first dance. Evie’s dad and Dylan’s mum are heading toward the dance floor for one of those embarrassing wedding displays that you wish didn’t make you feel emotional, but which unfortunately do (unless you keep your mind firmly on all the epic wedding sex you’re going to be having later, that is).

“Listen,” Luke says, turning his body toward Rose’s. She twists to look at him, too, and Luke can tell—Luke can tell that she’s thinking what he is, that Luke would only have to say one clever thing and they could go back to his room later. She looks like she’d be athletic in bed, top-notch wedding sex for sure.

He’s trying to decide between his standby wedding sex pick-up lines (all clever), but just as he’s about to open his mouth, Dylan’s awful band twangs into life again.

Luke looks back at Evie and Dylan. The two of them are smiling at each other soppily again over their parents’ shoulders, those fucking arseholes.

Luke laughs—at them or at himself, he doesn’t know. He loves those idiots.

He thinks of the way Rose arrived, unannounced and unexpected, to say exactly what Luke had been thinking.

He thinks about the fact that he’ll probably never see Rose again after this. Luke has had a lot of top-notch wedding sex: he knows how it all goes.

He thinks of Phoebe.

He thinks, inexplicably, of Bond jumping out of a car.

“Listen,” he repeats. Rose smiles at him, inviting and unexpectedly warm, and Luke feels bolstered by it. He breathes in deeply, once, and says, “Could I maybe take you out on a date?”  
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> I’m [sigebeam](http://twitter.com/sigebeam) on twitter, [singingkingoftheroad](http://singingkingoftheroad.tumblr.com) on tumblr, syllic on [LJ](http://syllic.livejournal.com)/[DW](http://syllic.dreamwidth.org) (though I'm not on either much these days), or sigebeam at gmail, if longform epistolary feels are your thing (they are mine).


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